ABSTRACT
The disastrous crash in the herring fishery in the summer and autumn of 1967 was without warning. The previous ten years had been very good ones, and over this period something like a thousand Swedish fishermen had taken out bank loans to buy new boats. That year, the fish stocks collapsed. We are now in a better position to appreciate why this happened than people were at the time: it was largely the consequence of the extension of the commercial capital market into fish-catching, especially in the decade from 1957 to 1966, which provoked an enormous expansion of the Swedish fleet and, in turn, a huge increase in its catching-power. This catching-power put such great pressure on the herring stocks that the resource was bound to decline sooner or later. At that time, no one could have predicted when this might occur, or that, when it did, it would not be a gradual diminution in landings which would give the industry time to re-adjust, but rather would be a dramatic collapse which saw the catches of individual boats drop by half, two-thirds, or threequarters from one season to the next.
